Long before the Elian Gonzalez affair, the 2000 election recount or the Terri Schiavo mess, my wife, a native Floridian, had told me that Florida is actually two states. Northern Florida, she said, was like a part of the South. It was rural and poor and its allegiances were Confederate. The southern part of the state, on the other hand, had so many transplanted Northeners ("snow birds" who eventually transplanted themselves permanently) that it was more like New Jersey than Alabama.

Her analysis seems to be good as far as it went, but I think she left out an important third part of the state, the part that includes Miami, the population of which is heavily Hispanic, and which is, according to Joel Garreau in The Nine Nations of North America, the capital of the unofficial "nation" of The Islands.

With such a mix of populations, outlooks and allegiances, perhaps it's no wonder that Florida has taken over from California as the locale for the cultural and social fault lines across which our most public battles are fought. In the New York Times, Abby Goodnough has a short piece about the state (it can be found here):

Paradise is hard to sustain ... in a place with so many ethnic, age and class groups coexisting in ever more crowded communities. Nearly 1,000 people move to Florida each day, and the churning mix of blacks, Hispanics, retirees from other states, urban liberals, suburban moderates and conservative-leaning rural residents make for a volatile place with deep divisions and conflicting priorities.

"We have more intense collisions between gray hairs and brown hairs, Midwest people and Northeast people, money and nonmoney," said James Twitchell, a professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida. "The barriers are not very high, so the collisions can occur as if you're on one of those little electric cars at the fair, banging into things."

Lots of things go relatively unnoticed in Florida when tempests like the Schiavo case erupt, and it helps to take stock of what was missed, if only in hopes of predicting the next firestorm.

There was the abduction and murder of 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford in Homosassa, and the subsequent news, reported by The Miami Herald, that the whereabouts of 1,800 sex offenders registered with the state are unknown. The Legislature debated a bill that would allow law-abiding citizens to use deadly force against an attacker in public. The indictment of Orlando's mayor on a charge of paying someone to collect absentee ballots moved forward, and news emerged that a petting zoo was the likely source of a bacterial infection that sickened two dozen people, mostly children.

What will thrust Florida back into the international spotlight? And will there come a day when it cedes its sensational-news title to another state? The National Enquirer, after all, just moved from Boca Raton, where its offices were famously infected with anthrax in 2001, to New York City.

Mr. Kane, the pollster, said it was a matter of Florida, which became the 27th state in 1845, needing to mature.

"When people have lived here for a while and have roots and multiple generations, some other state will become the next Florida," he said. "Some other place where it's warm and there's a lot of land and opportunity for people to make their fortune."

Maybe Arizona, he said.

I've never really been fond of Florida -- the warmth is nice enough, but it's too humid, too flat and largely too sprawling for my tastes. Some of my family has moved there, but I doubt I'll ever join them. Still, it's not impossible. If I do, perhaps the parade will have already moved on by then.

If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.

If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.

(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)

Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.